Poplar St. (OFFICIAL WATTPAD UPLOAD)

Gilded Hands & Bloodstained Fingers

"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?" Quackity snarled, pounding on the heavy wooden door of the suite. "LET ME OUT! LEAVE RANBOO THE FUCK ALONE!"

The only response was distant squeals somewhere down the hallway.

The brutes had dumped him in here and locked the door behind him. The room appeared to be a luxury hotel room, or at least the closest you could get to that in the Nether. There was a bed against one wall, a dresser, a nightstand, a door that must've led to a bathroom, and a full length mirror that provided Quackity with a clear view of just how bad he looked.

He stalked back over to the mirror, glaring at his reflection.

He was covered in dirt and dust, his borrowed clothes torn and stained with both his own blood and splatters of purple that he guessed was from Ranboo. The dark circles under his eyes were more prominent than they'd been in a while, and some nasty bruises were forming on his right cheek from when that hoglin had launched him across the clearing. His wings were filthy too, feathers ragged and a dark reddish brown from the Nether's soil, matted and standing on end.

It took another few moments of staring at himself and thinking about how he looked like dogshit before Quackity noticed it.

"What the..." he mumbled, ruffling his feathers to shake some of the dirt off of them as he glanced down at his hands. His palms were still covered in cloth, but a strip of burn tissue peeking around the edge of the bandage on his left palm looked almost... deliberate?

Quackity hastily unwrapped his hands, cringing at the raw redness of his skin—

His eyes shot wide. Burned in the center of both his palms was a strange symbol, and the weirdest part was that he'd seen it before, on the casing of that scroll that Chief Ozhar had requested.

Suddenly a detail from his dream came back to him, and it made him freeze.

GO HOME, the strange woman has said.

Go home.

The realization hit Quackity like a bolt of lightning.

"Holy shit," he mumbled, rewrapping his burned hand. "Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit."

If he was going to figure out his past, he needed to go back, back to where everything started, back to the location of his earliest memories.

He needed to go back to Eurus.

———

Breaking out of the room was easier than he thought, after Quackity figured out that the bathroom had running water—a big mistake on Ozhar's part. He was able to freeze the lock and break it, and quickly knocked the guards outside unconscious by freezing some water into a club.

"Sorry," Quackity muttered as the second Piglin brute hit the ground with a dull thud.

Frankly, he didn't have anything to carry water in, leaving him dashing up the vacant corridor wielding a torch he'd stolen from its sconce.

Well, it was better than nothing.

Quackity skidded to a halt in an intersection, swearing under his breath. He was pretty sure he'd come from the right, but all these damn hallways looked the same.

He finally took the right corridor, praying he was going in the right direction.

He needed that scroll.

He needed to steal that scroll, and then get the hell out of here.

Alcohol withdrawal was definitely starting to affect his nerves, he realized when the sounds of nearby squeals made him yelp, whip around, and swing the torch so hard that it hit the blackstone wall and cracked.